Saturday, 18 May 2013

I'm looking forward to the KDE release of Linux Mint 15, it's probably a little while off yet but the release candidate of the Mate desktop has just been released so I thought I've give it a try, and to be honest, I don't like the start menu, I like the KDE desktop and the old Gnome desktop so I thought I'd try some tweaks, all this was done without the aid of a command line.

The one big bonus with this release is that it will mount an Android phone properly which to me is probably the best reason to upgrade.

I'm not going to go through the install procedure as it's easy and if you can't install it then you shouldn't be doing this.

Once it's installed, you'll get the nice new pretty login screen up, so login and let's begin.

Close down the popup box and tell it not to bother us again

Then right click on the bar at the bottom and select properties.

Now we go to orientation and select top

This moves the whole bar to the top of the screen, now let's get rid of the menu, right click on it and remove the tick from Lock To Panel.

Then another right click and remove.

We're going to do that with the remaining items on the left.

Now, let's click on Add To Panel

And then select the Menu Bar from the list as shown below.

This will pop the new menu in the middle of the bar, so right click on it and select Move and shift it over to the right.

As you can see, we now have something that looks like the Gnome desktop of old that a lot of people still prefer over the modern Gnome desktop. Let's now go to the System option and Control Centre.

Go to Desktop Settings

And I just want to show the items listed below on my desktop, so put a cross in each box.

And here's the desktop with a Samsung Galaxy S3 mounted

That was easy, no command line and in my opinion a much more friendly desktop.